1. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to a method for printing a digital print file using a system comprising a digital network which interconnects a plurality of service units, for example a plurality of printers, and a print file memory.
2. Discussion of the Background Art
A general method for printing a digital print file is known from European Patent Application EP 1 229 724. In this known method, a print job, i.e. the specified order to make a document, is submitted by a user to the digital network via a workstation, e.g. a personal computer. The print job comprises the print file itself, i.e. the data corresponding to the information that should be printed in the document, as well as metadata such as the name of the print file, the user that submits the job, and jobticket information, e.g. specifying the type of receiving material to be used, whether or not the document should be double-sided, etc.
Upon submitting the job, the system sends information corresponding to the print job, in particular the metadata, to each of the printers connected to the network, and stores the print file and information linking the job to a user in the memory. In an embodiment disclosed in EP 1 229 724, the memory is present on a print server. The metadata is used to create a mailbox in each of the printers, which mailbox is dedicated to the user corresponding to the submitted job. This way, a user can access his print jobs at each of the printers, simply by opening the mailbox corresponding to his name, also called his personal mailbox. After opening his mailbox and selecting one or more of the jobs to be printed, the system retrieves the corresponding print files from the memory and sends them to the local memory of the printer. The print files are then automatically printed, in accordance with the jobticket information. The advantage of this method over other known mailbox systems is that jobs can be accessed via any printer that is part of the system, and not only via a default printer.
The method as disclosed in EP 1 229 724, however, has an important disadvantage, in particular for systems which are constituted for many users. Since upon submitting of a job a dedicated mailbox is created in each of the printers, the number of mailboxes can increase significantly in each of those printers. When a user wants to open his mailbox in such a case, he has to run through a long list of personal mailboxes in order to access his mailbox. This can be very time consuming, prone to making mistakes, and annoying to users, in particular when alphanumerical logically sequenced codes are used to identify each of the users corresponding to respective mailboxes.